|
|
Post by mhbruin on Dec 27, 2022 9:40:16 GMT -8
Silence is golden. Duct tape is silver
Rich Russians are Suffering From a Curious Disease That Causes Them to Fall From High Buildings
Russian sausage tycoon Pavel Antov has been found dead at an Indian hotel, two days after a friend died during the same trip.
They were visiting the eastern state of Odisha and the millionaire, who was also a local politician, had just celebrated his birthday at the hotel.
Antov was a well known figure in the city of Vladimir, east of Moscow.
Last summer he denied criticising Russia's war in Ukraine after a message appeared on his WhatsApp account.
The millionaire's death is the latest in a series of unexplained deaths involving Russian tycoons since the start of the Russian invasion, many of whom have openly criticised the war.
Reports in Russian media said Mr Antov, 65, had fallen from a window at the hotel in the city of Rayagada on Sunday. Another member of his four-strong Russian group, Vladimir Budanov, died at the hotel on Friday.
Superintendent Vivekananda Sharma of Odisha police said Mr Budanov was found to have suffered a stroke while his friend "was depressed after his death and he too died". The Russian consul in Kolkata, Alexei Idamkin, told the Tass news agency that police did not see a "criminal element in these tragic events".
Oscar Meyer Never Fell Off a Tall Building.
|
|
|
|
Post by mhbruin on Dec 27, 2022 9:46:30 GMT -8
Midterm Election Surprises
Kari Lake flames out
Kari Lake, the charismatic former TV anchor in Arizona’s largest media market, Phoenix, and a protégé of the MAGA brand, was the favorite to become the state’s next governor after a campaign in which she emphatically embraced Trump’s false claims of a stolen election. Lake was widely seen as the election-denying candidate with the best chance to win a statewide race in a key battleground in the 2022 elections. Nearly every poll in the final stretch showed her leading her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs, the outgoing Arizona secretary of state, who was facing internal criticism for what some in the party called a lackluster campaign.
MAGA election deniers lose in swing states
Lake’s defeat was part of a trend in competitive states: Trump-aligned election deniers like Tudor Dixon in Michigan and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania also lost in governor’s elections.
Senate candidates running close to the MAGA brand, like Blake Masters in Arizona and Don Bolduc in New Hampshire, also lost.
Secretary of state contenders who echoed Trump’s fabricated claims of a stolen election lost, including Mark Finchem in Arizona, Kristina Karamo in Michigan and Jim Marchant in Nevada.
And in a more dramatic twist, two House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump — Peter Meijer of Michigan and Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington — were defeated in the primaries by GOP candidates who lost those seats to Democrats in November. One of them was backed by Trump: Joe Kent, who lost in a major upset to Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in a GOP-friendly Washington district.
It was a resounding series of defeats for election deniers.
Republicans make big gains in ... New York
In a sense, there was a red wave in 2022. It crashed on the shores of Long Island and swept through New York — but crested before it could travel any farther. Republicans flipped a remarkable four House seats statewide, a crucial result that enabled their narrow 220-213 majority. One of the fallen incumbents was House campaign chief Sean Patrick Maloney, who lost his redrawn suburban-rural district to GOP upstart Mike Lawler.
Democrats were blown out on Long Island, losing all four contests and netting the GOP two seats — one was won by George Santos, who is alleged to have misrepresented major parts of the résumé he ran on.
Democratic landslides in Pennsylvania, Michigan
Democrats made major gains in the critical battleground states of Michigan and Pennsylvania — both core to the winning electoral coalitions that launched Trump and President Joe Biden into office.
In Pennsylvania, Gov.-elect Josh Shapiro and Sen.-elect John Fetterman defeated Trump-backed Republicans Mastriano and Mehmet Oz by 15 points and 5 points, respectively. Their wins led Democrats to win every competitive House race and gain control of the state House for the first time in more than a decade — although recent vacancies have called that majority into question.
Democrats won so convincingly by tying Mastriano — a right-wing state senator whose hard-line anti-abortion-rights stance and presence outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, revolted moderates — to candidates up and down the ballot, including Oz, who struggled to distance himself from Mastriano to appeal to centrist voters.
In Michigan, Trump was focused on getting close allies who boosted his false assertions of a stolen election into office at all levels of government. Meanwhile, the governor’s primary was rocked by multiple disqualifications of high-profile candidates, leading Republicans to coalesce around Dixon, a conservative commentator.
The results were disastrous for Republicans. Democratic statewide incumbents all defeated GOP rivals and took control of both branches of the Legislature. A Trump-backed state Senate candidate who lost his primary predicted: “I don’t think you’re going to see Michigan flip red for a long, long time.”
Palin loses to a Democrat in Alaska — twice
In August, a Democrat won a House seat in Alaska for the first time in 50 years. It would be only three months before that Democrat, Mary Peltola, won again — for a full term in the House.
Deep-red Kansas backs abortion rights
There was no greater harbinger of how the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade would affect the election than in Kansas, where voters overwhelmingly rejected a referendum measure in August that would have allowed the state to ban abortion.
Even in the reddest of the Republican-leaning state’s counties, the abortion-rights side of the argument won. Take, for instance, Franklin County, which Trump carried by 40 points in 2020. The “no” option on the referendum measure, which was what abortions-rights supporters advocated for, won by more than 13 points. The trend was repeated in a number of pro-Trump counties.
Lauren Boebert's near-loss
An incumbent who virtually nobody thought was endangered was Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, the far-right MAGA Republican who was first elected in a safe GOP district in 2020 and rode into Congress seeking to carry her gun on Capitol grounds.
Yet her district — which spans the rural west of the state and includes some areas around Colorado Springs — fired a warning shot at her brand of politics: Boebert survived by just 546 votes against her Democratic rival, Adam Frisch. The race went to a recount, and it was one of the last contests in the country to be finalized.
|
|
|
|
Post by mhbruin on Dec 27, 2022 9:53:14 GMT -8
Follow the Money
Republican Rep.-elect George Santos admitted on Monday to many of the lies he got caught in only after being elected to Congress, but denied the broader implications of his pattern of lying and dodged some of the bigger issues raised by reports. In a series of interviews, Santos admitted to “résumé embellishment” but shrugged it off, saying that “a lot of people overstate in their résumés.”
While the list of lies Santos admitted to or downplayed is long, one huge question remains both important and completely unanswered: How did he lend his campaign $700,000? In 2020, when he ran for Congress and lost, his financial disclosure said he had little income. Just two years later, he supposedly had his own business that was paying him enough to cough up high six figures, though financial disclosure forms didn’t list any clients. Santos’ campaign website no longer claims his business, the Devolder Organization, manages $80 million in assets, but in his Monday interviews, he basically waved off questions about where that $700,000 came from.
|
|
|
|
Post by mhbruin on Dec 27, 2022 9:55:24 GMT -8
"Iceberg Dead Ahead, Captain!" We Are All Sailing on the Titanic.
As summer begins in the southern hemisphere, global warming has melted enormous swathes of Antarctic sea ice. The lowest extent of sea ice ever observed by satellite just a day or so ago.
The Amundsen Sea Embayment is about the size of Texas, and the ice is approximately two miles thick. The ASE is one of three ice drainage basins in West Antarctica. It includes the ice of Pine Island Glacier, Ninnis, and the remaining portion of the Thwaites glacier’s tongue. The flow of glaciers to the sea in the embankment has been accelerating significantly since the turn of the century. Snowfall is what adds volume to the ice streams and has not changed.
The central tongue of Thwaites Glacier formed a dramatic rift in 2001, and in 2002 broke away from the main glacier, became stuck on a sea mount, and stayed there until NASA Worldview imagery showed the iceberg named B22 freed itself this month and now floating quickly to the open sea. The development is critical news as Thwaites is now exposed to stormy southern ocean wave action that will repeatedly lift and pound the vulnerable and retreating shelf coined as the doomsday glacier. The collapse of Thwaites and possibly the entirety of the Amundsen Sea Embayment’s land ice to flow into the ocean, raising sea levels worldwide by four feet.
If you are wondering if this news has made headlines yet, it hasn’t.
Meanwhile, the neighboring Pine Island Glacier, a geothermal heat source from volcanic activity under the ice, has been confirmed. There is plenty of discussion on what this will mean, but the finding by no means contradicts the severe climate impacts in Pine Island Bay. Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW) “is the primary heat source for melting glacial ice and its increased presence on the Amundsen Sea continental shelf has been implicated in the rapid melting and grounding line retreat observed beneath the Pine Island Glacier...”
The study confirmed active “geochemical evidence of a volcanic heat source upstream of the fast-melting Pine Island Ice Shelf, documented by seawater helium isotope ratios at the front of the Ice Shelf cavity.”
In other words, the volcano is not directly melting the ice. The volcanism has the potential to heat the bedrock along with the friction generated by the ice grinding over the bedrock, which will make the land ice slide into the southern ocean that much easier.
|
|
|
|
Post by mhbruin on Dec 27, 2022 10:00:00 GMT -8
Can a Lake Crash Into an Iceberg?After a judge ruled on Saturday that Kari Lake’s attorneys did not prove she lost the Arizona Governor’s race to Katie Hobbs because election officials intentionally tampered with Maricopa County’s voting machines and the ballots’ chain of custody, Lake said immediately that she would appeal the decision to the Arizona Supreme Court. Monday she tweeted a claim that Peter Thompson, the Republican-appointed Maricopa County Judge who issued the ruling ending Lake’s misguided quest, was being coached by Marc Elias, the democracy champion. His team beat down most of trump’s flimsy lawsuits after the 2020 election, and they assisted Maricopa County and Secretary of State Katie Hobbs’ office last week. Almost immediately Lake deleted that tweet.  Lake and her attorneys, one who previously represented the inept Cyber Ninjas “audit” scammers (doing such a great job they were fined out of existence), probably had second thoughts about accusing a judge and lawyers of ethical violations, especially after those same lawyers filed another motion today, asking the judge she accused of wrongdoing to sanction Lake’s attorneys, as well as make them pay court costs for last week’s stupid stunt, which could run well into the high six figures. "This Court should sanction both lawyers and client under A.R.S. § 12-349 to impart to them the seriousness of their misuse of the courts to seek to undermine Arizona elections and impugn hardworking elections workers and officials for purely political – not legal – purposes." Lake’s same attorneys were sanctioned after they filed their first baseless lawsuit contesting the election results. The ruling Saturday dismissed her second lawsuit, with the same result—no findings to change the election outcome. Now it remains to be seen if the second case will also end in sanctions and fines. "Plaintiff and her attorneys knew—or, at least, they should have known—that they had no witness testimony or evidence that would allow them to meet the Court’s required showing, yet they refused to voluntarily dismiss this action."
|
|
|
|
Post by mhbruin on Dec 27, 2022 10:02:04 GMT -8
I Think It's a Good Legal Strategy
|
|
|
|
Post by mhbruin on Dec 27, 2022 10:06:04 GMT -8
Go Sort Nuts!!He had made it through four years of denials and appeals, and Robert Heard was finally before a Social Security judge who would decide whether he qualified for disability benefits. Two debilitating strokes had left the 47-year-old electrician with halting speech, an enlarged heart and violent tremors. There was just one final step: A vocational expert hired by the Social Security Administration had to tell the judge if there was any work Heard could still do despite his condition. Heard was stunned as the expert canvassed his computer and announced his findings: He could find work as a nut sorter, a dowel inspector or an egg processor — jobs that virtually no longer exist in the United States. “Whatever it is that does those things, machines do it now,” said Heard, who lives on food stamps and a small stipend from his parents in a subsidized apartment in Tullahoma, Tenn. “Honestly, if they could see my shaking, they would see I couldn’t sort any nuts. I’d spill them all over the floor.” He was still hopeful the administrative law judge hearing his claim for $1,300 to $1,700 per month in benefits had understood his limitations. But while the judge agreed that Heard had multiple, severe impairments, he denied him benefits, writing that he had “job opportunities” in three occupations that are nearly obsolete and agreeing with the expert’s dubious claim that 130,000 positions were still available sorting nuts, inspecting dowels and processing eggs. Every year, thousands of claimants like Heard find themselves blocked at this crucial last step in the arduous process of applying for disability benefits, thanks to labor market data that was last updated 45 years ago. The jobs are spelled out in an exhaustive publication known as the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. The vast majority of the 12,700 entries were last updated in 1977. The Department of Labor, which originally compiled the index, abandoned it 31 years ago in a sign of the economy’s shift from blue-collar manufacturing to information and services. Social Security, though, still relies on it at the final stage when a claim is reviewed. The government, using strict vocational rules, assesses someone’s capacity to work and if jobs exist “in significant numbers” that they could still do. The dictionary remains the backbone of a $200 billion disability system that provides benefits to 15 million people. It lists 137 unskilled, sedentary jobs — jobs that most closely match the skills and limitations of those who apply for disability benefits. But in reality, most of these occupations were offshored, outsourced, and shifted to skilled work decades ago. Many have disappeared altogether. 
|
|
|
|
Post by mhbruin on Dec 27, 2022 10:10:02 GMT -8
This is Real "Animal Style"
A man was arrested on hate crime charges after police said a TikTok video showed him hurling homophobic and racist remarks at a Korean-American man and woman dining at a California In-N-Out Burger.
Jordan Douglas Krah, of Denver, Colorado, was taken into custody Monday by San Ramon police and booked at the Martinez Detention Facility on two counts of committing a hate crime, a police news release states.
The arrest stems from an incident on Christmas Eve at an In-N-Out Burger in San Ramon. Arine Kim and her friend Elliot Ha were filming a TikTok video of Ha's reaction to Kim's food order, she posted in the caption of the video.
Police said in the news release that Krah approached Ha and Kim "unprovoked and engaged in a homophobic and racist rant." The encounter caused Ha and Kim to "fear for their safety," police said.
In the video, Kim asked her friend if he had ever tried a "light-well fry." Before he could answer, Krah interrupted them and asked if they were filming themselves eating. When Ha responded that they were, Krah called them "weird homosexuals."
Things escalated and at one point in the video, Krah threatened to spit in Ha's face and called him a homophobic slur.
"See you outside in a minute," Krah said in the video.
Because of Krah's threats, Ha and Kim waited for the restaurant to close and had workers walk them to their car, NBC Bay Area reported.
|
|
